In the Thick of the Fight: The Writing of Emily Wilding Davison, Militant Suffragette

Afterword

208 Afterword In a letter in the Adelaide, Australia, Mail on Saturday, August 16, 1913, two British suffragettes, a Miss Hodge and a Miss Newcombe, described Emily Davison’s London funeral and praised her as a “dearly loved comrade” who “has passed on to the Throne of God the petition of the little outraged children, of the victims of white slavery, of the sweated working women, and of all those who suffer and are sad. Hers was a glorious life and a glorious death, and the glory of her spirit will live in our hearts forever. We gave her a splendid funeral.” Their expression of pride and grief affirmed Emily Davison’s life and focused attention on the issues for which she fought—­ economic justice, women ’s freedom to choose their partners, and to define their lives for themselves. Her writing shows just how important and how central these causes were to her life and her hope for the future. The urgency of these causes has faded over time, and today the British suffrage movement is generally thought of, when it is recalled at all, as a struggle for the vote. Emily Davison believed it was a much bigger struggle, one for the soul of society and she saw this struggle in all the particulars she engaged in her writing—­ in her support of the Bermondsey strikers, in her deprecation of the way the culture she lived in constrained women, kept them, as she put it, cabined and confined. Her hopes for a better future appear in the happy children and families of her short story Gretna Green and her exhilaration at the 1913 May Day festivities she described as a celebration of fellowship and harmony. The forces she fought against were paradoxically deeply entrenched yet hard to confront—­ supporters of the customary as the necessary, of the gendered practices of daily life as “normal” and therefore “right.” Reading the Afterword 209 texts of the suffrage movement reminds us that the continual struggle for human rights and human progress is waged against a continual opposition based on desire for power and anxiety about loss, as if one person or group’s gain came at the expense of others. Emily Davison believed that expanding civil rights was not a zero-­ sum game, but a multiplier of prosperity. One of the elements of the British woman suffrage movement that is hardest to understand is how the power of the government could be martialed against women exercising the basic civil rights of petitioning and gathering . Suffragettes were on the front line and in the thick of the fight not only because many chose militancy, but also because they were often forced into a vanguard position by the absence of state protection. In the same letter quoted earlier, the writers tell of how just before the Emily Davison’s funeral, “At the last moment the Chief Commissioner of Police sent to the Women’s Social and Political Union to say that he could not be answerable for any disturbance, and he would advise the W.S.P.U. to send a hundred women to follow Miss Davison up the streets, as trouble would surely arise otherwise.” “Of course,” they write, “a defiant answer was returned and the original plan was followed in every detail.” How could it have been otherwise? Five thousand women and hundreds of men marched in that funeral procession , knowing that in addition to mourning and celebrating their comrade they were facing the possibility of a hostile mob without the full protection of the police. For most of the length of the procession all went well, thousands quietly lined the streets, as photographs taken all along the route show. At King’s Cross, where Emily Davison’s body was to begin its journey home to Morpeth, trouble arose. Jeering and angry men threatened, “If you interfere with our sport, we’ll show you what we can do!” The police did clear a path for the suffragettes, but even so some of the women were assaulted, and it was not the police who saved them: “a friend of mine was almost torn to bits, and she would have been quite, if three dockers had not come to the rescue.” Everyone who wrote of Emily Davison’s funeral and the cortege that wound its way through London recalled the vivid impression it made, the coffin covered by a “purple pall with a silver fringe and a broad arrow on each side, a suffragette...